‘An habituée of the Romanisches Café’: Alix Strachey’s 1920s Berlin

Abstract

Introduction

I walked out to Grunewald after I left you & got to Hundekehle (feeling till Halensee that your motor might overtake me) where I swilled a good deal of beer. I thought, till I had the beer, that I couldn’t face my analysis that day; but after it I felt braced & struggled through somehow. – In the afternoon, I came across traces of you: first at the bank near the Gedächtniskirche, where the man said you’d changed a pound […], then here, where the lady of the house graciously swam forward (in German, – how did you succeed in intimidating her?) & said how greatly she’d enjoyed making the acquaintance of my Herr Gemahl; & finally in the Gepäck, neatly stacked & facing the right way round.¹

Thus begins an unusual account of life in Berlin written in the early twentieth century from an Anglophone perspective. Married couple Alix and James Strachey exchanged frequent letters during Alix’s stay in Berlin from 1924 to 1925, providing future readers with a lively, amusing and original account of psychoanalysis in the making, of 1920s Berlin life as compared to Bloomsbury, and of the vicissitudes of acting as translators of Freud into English while living on both sides of the Channel.²

In order to make sense of this rich epistolary representation of Berlin, I have chosen a cultural-exchange-studies approach. Cultural exchange theory helps to bridge the gap between material history in the stricter sense – who travelled, to which place, in what manner, with whom – and cultural or literary history, interested in the exchange and dynamic appropriation of ideas, texts, cultural practices and the representation of such exchanges. ‘Culture’ refers both to cultural objects and to activities in an ethnographic sense, encompassing everyday activities, objects and practices. It also refers to ‘national’ cultures which are separated by some kind of social, geographical, political or linguistic border. Cultural exchange theory allows for a simultaneous focus on the mediators of exchange processes, on the objects as well as the ideas they exchange or at least send on their way, and on the symbolic artistic representations and meta-level reflection of such exchange processes.³

Alix and James Strachey’s correspondence from 1924 and 1925 serves as a case in point. In their letters, they discuss material issues, such as travel times and routes, food, clothing, geography, or public and private spaces. At the same time, they also discuss cultural and social practices, intellectual concerns, and representations. In addition, they both travel to and fro, and work as mediators, helping to spread Freud’s word across Europe, and particularly in England; they are also instrumental in assisting key figures such as Melanie Klein to gain a foothold in psychoanalytic circles in England. In their comments on everyday life in Berlin, contrasted with that in London, and by sending books from Berlin to London and back again, they construct their own Berlin space in symbolic and in material terms. The following article looks at this particular ‘Strachey’ view of the city and its sometimes surprising reversal of what today’s readers think they know about early twentieth-century Berlin.

Alix and James Strachey visited Berlin together in September 1924; Alix was to remain in the city, in order to be analysed by Freud’s friend Karl Abraham, improve her German, attend psychoanalytic lectures at the Berlin Polyclinic, founded in 1920, and continue their joint attempt at translating Freud’s major works into English. James left for London, needing to bolster their income by analysing patients, and to look after their house in Gordon Square which they had sub-let to a number of Bloomsbury figures, including John Maynard Keynes. Their letters are a highly readable and unusual juxtaposition of the private and the professional. What emerges is a particular portrait of a relationship, but also of Berlin, a portrait which is important for the history of Anglophone representations of the city. For one thing, it adds a much-needed female perspective. For another, it adds the early years of 1920s Berlin to the dominant if not overpowering representations of early twentieth-century Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Furthermore, Alix Strachey’s representation of the city adds a new facet that contradicts in some respects the widespread dislike of Berlin as expressed by other members of the Bloomsbury group, most notably Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose notoriously disastrous stay there in the late 1920s is better known than Alix Strachey’s. Finally, it shows how important Berlin was, next to Vienna, in creating an international, professional psychoanalytical community. The latter was short-lived, of course, in its Berlin incarnation, since most protagonists mentioned or encountered by Alix Strachey had to emigrate after 1933.⁴

In the following, I will not concentrate so much on Alix Strachey’s immersion in psychoanalytic circles in Berlin, since this has been admirably done by the editors of Alix and James Strachey’s letters.⁵ Nor do I want to take sides in the discussion of how ‘good’ or lasting their Freud translations were. Rather, I will focus on the particular image which a female Anglophone resident of Berlin draws of the city, as well as on the acts of cultural exchange which Alix Strachey, supported by James Strachey, actively undertook.

Urban spaces: Berlin as experienced and observed by Alix Strachey

At the beginning of her stay in Berlin, Alix Strachey did not venture very far from her Grunewald ‘Pension’. Like her, most Anglophone visitors stayed in the more affluent residential western parts of Berlin, in Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf or Grunewald. Forays to the East or into working-class areas such as Christopher Isherwood’s to Kreuzberg were rarer. Alix Strachey went for walks in the Hundekehle area, explored the Havel lakes such as Krumme Lanke, and took the tram into town to visit bookshops, museums, ticket offices, the zoo, lending libraries, amusement parks, the cinema, the leading department store ‘Kaufhaus des Westens’ and, most importantly, cafés. At the beginning of her correspondence with James, she gives detailed accounts of her visits to ‘Konditoreien’ such as Café Telschow or the Rundfunk Konditorei Schilling, and the wonderful hot chocolate and cake she indulges in. Later on, she writes more about the time she spent reading, writing and meeting people at the Romanisches Café, finding there a like-minded community of thinkers and writers. Café life was widespread among artists, writers, theatre directors, painters and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Berlin allowed them visibility at the same time as a relatively private – and cheap – space in which to write.⁶ Alix Strachey also went to the cafés to listen to music from the radio, a significant aspect of her cultural activities, which also included frequent visits to theatre and ballet performances. Transitory spaces such as train stations are important for all travellers, be they short-term or long-term, since they mark both the first encounter with the city and its inhabitants, and the interim space in which home and abroad meet when one welcomes friends from home, or says good-bye to them. The act of travelling was quite fraught for Alix Strachey, resulting in a number of comments detailing her fear of travelling back to London on her own (285, 289), and accounts of James’s return trip to England, including weather reports and the state of the sea (69, 150). Travelling to Berlin took roughly two days, and the notorious Channel crossing features in many accounts.

The Berlin spaces in which Alix moved also allowed her to mix with local residents as well as other international travellers and visitors. Her comments on Prussian officialdom following problems with her permit or forgetting to take her passport mark her forays into ‘official’ Berlin:

I’m afraid I rather disgraced myself today: I went off to the district Post Office to enquire about the type-script; & forgot to take my pass-port or any identificatory ‘Schein’ of any sort. So that was no good. (6 October 1924: 81)

I’ve been spending the last two days in a regular ‘Hetzzustand’, trying to prevent the police from extraditing me. For my leave of stay was up on December 3d: & of course I had forgotten all about it until, by accident, last Monday, I happened to look at my Passport. (11 December 1924: 143)

Alix’s comments on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and the Polyclinic mark her professional activities as a follower and practitioner of psychoanalysis, while her visits to cafés, dance halls and bars serve as intermediate spaces in which she was active both in a private and in a public capacity. Her capacity in Berlin was private in so far as she indulged in cultural activities in which she continued to be interested no matter where she was staying (music, ballet, theatre), and public in that she had both professional psychoanalytic debates as well as semi-professional encounters with other anglophone visitors to Berlin and with Germans. There is a certain overlap between both groups of people with which she was involved – members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society asked her to balls and dances, as well as to talks on psychoanalysis. The international mix of people with many different geographical and national allegiances, ranging from Eastern Europe to England and America, whose differences Alix Strachey observed with interest, are an important aspect of 1920s Berlin. Typical for the time, but still slightly surprising since she mingled frequently with Jewish artists, analysts and intellectuals, are Alix’s anti-Semitic remarks, which make for uncomfortable reading. One particularly disagreeable example can be found in her letter to James, dated 18 February 1925 (207), written at the Café Telschow. She describes a number of men she encountered, and compares a right-wing gentile German journalist with his Jewish colleagues:

Considering his political views I ought to have at him – but to tell you the truth, apart from being clearly a madman, his character & general being was so much better & more … well, something like ‘honourable’ tho’ that’s old-fashioned, than these Rosens & Levisohns, who, altho’ they’re on the right side as far as views go, seem fundamentally unprincipled – liars & back-biters & ‘louche’ – that, in short, it’s difficult to know.

Alix and James Strachey as cultural mediators

Both Alix and James Strachey were obviously much interested in German culture and the German language. Both partners mixed English with German phrases, indicating their level of proficiency, and highlighting their role as translators of Freud’s works. James for example speculated whether it would not be nicer to spend the ‘Firedays’ at Easter ‘in the Mark (Brandenburg)’ rather than in Berlin, explained he would like to have ‘an echt moderne Krankengeschichte – with Eagos and Supereegos and Ids and what not’ to translate, and concluded ‘I feel so pleased about Easter coming nearer. But that’s verboten’ (7 February 1925: 197). Other letters are less playful about psychoanalysis and contain serious discussions on how to translate certain technical terms or whether simply to use the original German terms in a psychoanalytic discussion, mixing German and English (18 December 1924: 150–152; 2 January 1925: 171).

Alix and James Strachey acted as cultural mediators on two levels. Not only did they provide English-language versions of works by Freud, they also helped to pave the way for a key continental psychoanalyst to enter the London or British world of psychoanalysis at a time when the demarcation lines of the profession were still being drawn. Alix Strachey sent a report of a crucial talk on child psychoanalysis, given by Melanie Klein at the Berlin Seminar, to James, who circulated it in London (16 December 1924: 147; 20 December 1924: 154; 2 January 1925: 171). This eventually paved the way for Melanie Klein to give a series of lectures at the British Psycho-Analytic Society in London, which in turn led to her settling in Britain after the death of Karl Abraham (the founding father of the Berlin Psychoanalytical Society and loyal follower of Freud), which also cut short Alix Strachey’s residency in Berlin. Alix attempted to teach Melanie Klein English, and co-wrote and translated her London lectures. This process of introduction and mediation, supported actively by James, was an important aspect of Melanie Klein’s British career as a controversial and highly influential proponent of psychoanalysis, in particular of children.

On a slightly more mundane level, Alix Strachey served as a cultural mediator by sending James German books, and engaging him in a written conversation on Anglo-German cultural differences. James, as well as other friends from England, most notably Dudley Ward, the Berlin correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, acted as similar couriers, either sending or personally transporting objects from England to Berlin or vice versa. In addition to fostering her growing interest in African art and in anthropology (an interest shared by many other writers and artists at the time), Alix read Theodor Fontane’s novels, perhaps wanting to understand turn-of-the-century Berlin with the help of literature. Consequently, Fontane’s novels cross the Channel in both directions. She seems to have tired of him quite soon, however, asking James to send Dante’s Inferno and the Oxford Book of English Verse, since she is ‘pining for something a little more juicy than this ghastly product of a dreary tongue called German Literature. My good man, saving music & intellect – which may be everything – they are hopeless’ (18 October 1924: 98). About Fontane’s novel Irrungen, Wirrungen (Trials and Tribulations, 1887), she supposed ‘it can’t take long to read – if it can be read at all’ (15 November 1924: 117). She also commented on Heinrich Mann’s Die kleine Stadt (The Small Town, 1909) as ‘passable’ and Shaw’s St Joan, which she read in Tieck’s translation. She thought it did not stand up to Don Quixote (117). Other writers whose works she read during the Berlin period were Kurt Hamsun (226), Sven Hedin (239) and Frazer’s Golden Bough (217), as well as books of art which travelled backwards and forwards between London and Berlin in similar fashion, in addition to the manuscripts of the Stracheys own Freud translations (77, 173, 201). This breadth of interests shows a lively mind at work, one not afraid to judge other people’s works scathingly. But in spite of the international range of authors, the letters also display a sense of bewilderment at German literature. Rather surprisingly, Alix relied more on the by-then outdated literary image of Berlin to be found in Fontane’s novels, rather than on more contemporary authors whose representations of life in Berlin might have given her a different impression of German literature, such as the works of Kurt Tucholsky.

Exchanging objects and discussing cultural practices

In keeping with her musical interests, Alix Strachey’s visits to concerts and to radio cafés were frequent, and a constant topic in her letters. Alix took a lot of time trying to find a published programme for James which stated the correct times and radio stations for him so that he would be able to listen to the transmission at the same time as she did. This was necessary since the radio station would have differed according to the geographical location of the listener: a Berlin radio concert could be listened to in London, but with a different wave-frequency than in Berlin. The new medium of the radio served less as a transmitter of news (although James also heard the Berlin election results on German radio [141]) than as a transmitter of culture, and in a more private sense, as a further medium through which the Strachey’s could maintain their relationship. Alix’s account of a radio concert gives a lively impression of a Berlin café scene at the height of modern developments – a Rundfunk Konditorei – as do her unfavourable comments on the choice of German music. Ironically, she interpreted the whole experience in the light of Edward Hitschmann’s schematic representation of Freudian theory:

Dearest James, […] I’m sitting in my favourite Rundfunk Konditorei (Schilling, Ecke Kurfürstendamm and X strasse, gegenüber Gedächtniskirche) & listening to a succession of Johann (?) & Joseph (?) Strauss waltzes, shockingly distorted, & worsened by a ‘Kontrolleur’ who sits with his head in a cupboard (where valves glow mysteriously) & now & then causes the most alarming cracklings & sudden interruptions to issue forth. The whole is exactly like a Hitschmann diagram of the dream-mechanism, in which the loud-speaker = gruesome, cavernous unc. & the Kontrolleur, the repressive Zensur. The result is a nightmare. (5 December 1924: 137)

Two weeks later, she sent James a similar account of the Rundfunk Konditorei at Café Schilling, vividly describing not only the vicarious nature of the medium of radio but also what she thought of the other members of the audience:

Dearest James, The loud-speaker having broken down in the middle of a Strauss Waltz, a blessed silence has descended, the Publikum also has ceased to roar & rage over their coffee-cups (the croaking of the music seems to have a directly stimulating effect on their own ‘organen’), & I can just collect enough thought to write to you […]. ‘Aus Richard Wagner’s Loh – hen – grin’ … ? Yes, it’s coming … violins moaning very high up in the air … . Oh God, what is it? I think it’s connected with a vision of a very uncertain swan wobbling onto the stage & L.G. holding on tight – but then that’s all I think of when I think of Lohengrin überhaupt. Oh, well. However, I went to hear 3 Beethoven Trios on Sunday evening; & I thought them very sentimental & not very severe. […] … now I’ve got it – here it comes – ‘The Wedding March’ (?) – the explanation is that it’s a Pot Pourri.

I’ve discovered the right paper for you: It’s called Die Sendung & costs only 10 Pf. a week. I’m sending you a sample number. (16 December 1924: 149)

Apart from visits to concerts, museums, the occasional film and Russian ballet performances, the most important cultural practice which Alix indulged in during her time in Berlin was going to dances. She complained about the lack of suitable dancing partners – no one being tall enough for her – but nevertheless went to every ball to which she was invited, often together with Melanie Klein, and often until the early hours of the morning. A particularly telling account gives an impression of the – for others – sexually charged atmosphere and the author’s sharp eye and talent for trenchant description:

a young man, about 19, had, with great timidity, managed to come to our table & ask me to dance. I was clearly a Mother-Imago. Well, having got me, he couldn’t get away (M.-fixation). – Fortunately, he danced quite well. I tried, after about 1½ hr. of this, to shove him onto various young females of his own age (Sister-transference), & he tried, too, but failed & clung to me. So I went off rather suddenly. Later in the evening I looked him up again, & we danced together, but he seemed offended & depressed (injured Narcissism). […] Of course, the crisis, the point at which he broke down, was when the waiter (Father-Imago) exposed him before me as having no money (= faeces – penis) & so being unable to get his Ma away from his Dad. (23 February 1925: 213–14)

In a further letter (2 February 1925: 193), we learn how Alix Strachey and Melanie Klein attended a ‘Maskenball’, with Melanie Klein dressed up as Cleopatra: ‘terrifically décolletée – & covered in bangles & rouge – exactly as I imagine C. did look in the late Anthonies. She was frightfully excited & determined to have a thousand adventures, & soon infected me with some of her spirits.’ Interestingly, and in sharp contrast to received opinion about 1920s Berlin night life, Alix did not consider these dances and fancy-dress occasions as particularly outré. In a number of comparisons with Bloomsbury dances and events, she described Berlin as rather tame.

Reflections of cultural exchange and the Germans

The balls were also occasions which Alix Strachey used to observe others, engage in conversation, and reflect on German people, politics and habits. Alix Strachey’s comments on national or geographic differences between the English and the Germans are quite acerbic. Like many other diarists and travellers with an anglophone background, she was at first inclined to comment on the food and the weather. Food features heavily, in particular cake, whipped cream, cocoa and café culture. The weather is of course remarked on unfavourably, in particular the cold, and inadequate heating arrangements (117, 238). Berlin winters are mentioned in many accounts (for example Vanessa Bell in a letter written to Julian Bell on 22 January 1929).⁷ It is not therefore surprising to find them here as well. The same goes for the shock at being confronted with unrelenting Prussian officers manning post-offices and police departments (81, 143, 198, 253, 287). But, undeterred by the weather and by officialdom, Alix Strachey lived a busy social life, sparking comments on German taste, politics, men, social relations and class issues, and on Anglo-German cultural, social and political differences. She immersed herself in middle-class and upper-middle class Berlin life, and this makes her letters differ from more transitory visitors’ comments such as the other members of the Bloomsbury group.⁸ However, Alix’s views of the Germans remained surprisingly fixed and critical throughout her stay.

While the letters document the exchange of objects, acts of mediation, the appropriation of social and cultural activities, and the spaces in which these activities take place, they also serve as reflections on cultural differences and on cultural exchange. They were written to let James Strachey be part of Alix Strachey’s Berlin life, but serve equally well as a literary construction and representation of 1920s Berlin in a more general sense. Letters have a particular value for cultural exchange studies since they, like fictional texts, represent as well as document cultural exchange. However, the informal nature of letters also lends itself to reflection on a meta-level, thus providing the reader with comments about the immediate material experience of exchange as well the reflections on this particular experience.

Although ultimately Alix Strachey’s case, concerning her expired leave of stay, before the police-court led to a decision in her favour, allowing her to remain in Berlin, she was surprised that she finally received an ‘Aufenthalts-bewilligungsverländerungserlaubnis (I think this is correct)’, and that her visit to ‘that lion’s den, the local Polizeirevier, & the official was extremely friendly’ (1 May 1925: 253). This is in sharp contrast to her views on Prussianism and Germans in general, which she saw confirmed in many instances. She suspected that a book of poems by Edward Lear would be wasted on her German contact (184) and could not understand why one should like Fridericus Rex, the well-known UFA film about Frederick the Great:

Really, I think the Prussians – Germans – deserve all they get. Old Frederick I was dotty & they let him behead everyone he chose, instead of simply beheading him. – The actual audience clapped once & once only; & that was when his Grenadiers marched past doing the goose-step. Can you believe it? And of course they never laughed once. (17 June 1925: 287)

Alix Strachey commented regularly on current political affairs. While she revealed herself as an imperialist – at least from a twenty-first-century view-point (26) and particularly when it came to British politics – she talked revolution and communism with her Jewish contact Abramson and another unnamed German (149), and followed the local elections closely (247), prior to which she expected violence to erupt (238). More than ten years before Isherwood’s feverish representations of the Berlin political scene, but certainly not with the sense of gloom which John White has identified as one of three central representational angles from which Berlin in the interwar period was portrayed,⁹ Alix Strachey described Berlin politics in the following manner:

Berlin is seething, so I’m told, with excitement, for today are the elections. Out of the window of the Café I see processions of lorries, mostly, I fear, Schwarz-Weiss-Roth [the German Nationalist Party], covered with flags, & filled with yelling éphèbes – all hideous – teeming round & round the Gedächtniskirche. Trumpets, etc tooting, & the street littered with mud-soaked pamphlets. But most people seem quite apathetic. Two men have just clinked their beer glasses together opposite me: ‘Also, prost! Die Demokratische Partei!’ That fills me with a sense of solidity & comfort. For one has the feeling that all patriots are dangerously mad, & most internationalists, too. (7 December 1924, written at the Romanisches Café)

Alix Strachey did not move only in expatriate circles; rather, she met and talked to a wide variety of Berlin residents, not all of whom were Berliners. Therefore, her remarks on Berlin acquaintances are often used pars pro toto for Germans in general, about whose character she had quite a lot to say. Although she defended Germans in conversations with Rothay Reynolds, the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail, in her letters to James she was quite frank. In Alix Strachey’s opinion, German men lacked a sense of humour (84, 287), they were simple-minded (212), were often plodding and boring (150, 225), had doubtful taste in everything from furnishings to music and paintings (144), and ‘are not palpitating nor do they cause palpitations in others’ (21 February 1925: 212). Although she often wrote about sex, missed James in that respect as in all others, and analysed social occasions in sexual and psychoanalytical terms, Alix Strachey did not engage with Germans sexually (or at least there is no evidence in her letters).

In even sharper contrast to John White’s dictum of Berlin as the sexual Mecca of the interwar period, Alix’s Berlin fell short of her expectations. She attended all-night balls and evening dinners frequently, but they did not meet her Bloomsbury standards, as she explained to James:

I’ve just been drinking afternoon coffee with the Bally’s & Frau Kempner [two further members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, G.S.] whose paper you didn’t like. It was quite pleasant – much nicer than the company at an evening party I went to at the Simmel’s last Thursday. They were pseudo-intellectual Bohemians or bohemian intellectuals – sub-sub-subissimo Bloomsbury, – & very pretentious, tiresome & vulgar. (17 June 1925: 282)

‘My God, when I look back on conversations in Bloomsbury – Virginia – Charly [Sanger] – Lytton … what have I been brought to!’, she wrote, following a laboured talk with a Swiss whom she had met at the Romanisches Café and who insisted on explaining endlessly that Bismarck’s name was spelt with a ‘c’ and a ‘k’ (215–16).

In a similar vein, she reflected on one of the balls she danced at as a rather staid affair which did not excite her in the least, nor would it have met with approval by other members of the Bloomsbury circle:

I discreetly pushed off with an unknown & rather ghastly German, who, as usual, hid an iron will behind a gay (My God!) exterior. In short, what he wanted was an ‘English conversation’ with me, because he was a business man (‘buthyness’, I think – his name was Israel. I did not know such things were possible) & it was so useful for him. So in the intervals of solemnly rotating on our axes on one point of the floor in a somewhat indecent attitude, for Teutons have a penchant for feeling ladies’ bottoms, we discoursed in English, until I finally turned on the man & retired to our ‘Stammsitz’ […] . My next adventure was with a highly respectable – really quite passable – musically & artistically etc. inclined man who recognized me as an habituée of the Romanisches Café. We did a little perfunctory dancing & then had a tolerable conversation. […] But it was a sad performance, & when I think of Piccadilly & professional Mr. Greatorex ... oh, la la! (140)¹⁰

And finally, damningly, she concluded on another occasion:

It is definitely proved that dancing is, in its humble way, a sublimated activity: as soon as direct sexual sensations intrude – & with most real Germans (God rest their souls) that seems to happen – the whole delight – the whole feeling of rhythm & having wings on one’s feet – is gone. And if I’m going to copulate I’d rather cut out the ‘dancing’. […] Yours – till now – faithfully, Alix. (2 February 1925: 193–94)

Conclusion

Rather than debauched or sexually exciting, Alix Strachey thought Berlin nightlife quite boring and sedate, and compared it unfavourably to Bloomsbury dances, balls, plays and other social occasions. This may have been due to homesickness, but was perhaps not due only to that. Possibly our image of wild Berlin is exaggerated or, because it is so heavily influenced by representations of gay Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s, its character has come to be seen as particularly ‘wild’.¹¹ It is also highly likely that the early 1920s differed considerably from the later 1920s, and even more so from the 1930s. The years 1924 and 1925 were only the beginning of sexually liberated times, and a decade later, during Isherwood’s, Auden’s and Spender’s time, Berlin nightlife had become much less constrained. Since Alix Strachey limited her activities to a certain class – the middle and upper-middle classes – and was outspoken in her dislike of working-class activities such as visiting the six-day races and seeing ‘30 pairs of stumpy, dirty lower-class legs in old Jaeger combinations, going round & round on the bicycle treadles’ (10 March 1925: 231), this may also reflect a class bias.¹²

Alix Strachey used her letters to maintain her relationship with James and to reflect on Berlin and on Anglo-German differences. They are a document of a rich cultural life, of cultural exchange between London and Berlin, and of Berlin in the early 1920s. What has emerged is an image of a diverse Berlin, or at least the middle-class section of it, consisting of café culture, balls, radio concerts, ballet and theatre on the one hand, and, on the other, a highly serious, very active internationally-influenced psychoanalytic network engaged in charting the territory of Freudian versus Jungian psychoanalysis. Although sexually charged scenes can be found in the letters, and Alix commented several times on James’s absence as a sexual partner as well as on her friend Josephine Dellisch’s sexual orientation and her own lack of interest, Alix’s reports on political events and discussions, and on observing the city in general, do not confirm the three main representational patterns of Berlin from an anglophone perspective (sexual Mecca, city of doom, and Nazi metropolis) identified by John White.¹³ Nor do they conform entirely to the dominant Bloomsbury view of Berlin as ghastly. Instead, we find in the letters a feminine view of Berlin in all its contrasts to London, which challenges widespread notions, adding an interesting psychoanalytic and specific Bloomsbury twist in both material and symbolic, representational terms.

Footnotes